Programming was "cooked" before the current Artificial Inference hype. I am not saying reducing the tedium is not beneficial. Where is the innovation, attribution and intelligence?
Ask HN: Is Programming as a Profession Cooked?
21–30 of 34 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is Programming as a Profession Cooked?
#22It's been about a decade years since many thought full-self-driving cars were "just a couple years away". Reality is that FSD was/is a "few decades away" Same for programming. We can take our hands off the steering wheel for longer stretches of time, this is true, but if you have production apps with real users that spend real money then going to sleep at the wheel is far too risky. Programmers will become the guardi…
Self-driving cars are a bad example, because we are talking about a heavily regulated industries, with fatal consequences of malpractice, and a tool (the car) that is not easily available to the average person. I'm pretty sure that is the cost of cars would be comparable to what a software engineer pays for claude code, government would relax on the laws, and as a society we would accept a few (tens of) thousands of…
Software in the transportation industry, medical field, and elsewhere is quite literally life and death.
Re: Ask HN: Is Programming as a Profession Cooked?
#23The moment my manager or some other non-technical stakeholders start to use AI to push software to production and it works fine, that's the moment I'll know for sure I'm out of business. I don't think that's really gonna happen soon, not because of the tech, but because non-technical stakeholders need at least one more generation to change their mindset. It doesn't really matter if we reach AGI, your manager (or their manager) is too busy to be hands-off with anything and will most likely delegate to some IC. That IC is me.
Re: Ask HN: Is Programming as a Profession Cooked?
#2420k loc?!
Most of the projects I’ve worked on in my career have been ten to hundreds of millions lines of code!
Re: Ask HN: Is Programming as a Profession Cooked?
#25Was it cooked when they invented high-level languages and presumably every clerk got an ability to write Software? Surely it eliminated all need in people specialising in writing it, it became so simple. There's always a market for things that people are too lazy to do on their own.
Never in my career I have seen coding becoming so accessible. You needed to know the language in order to write code, now you just need to know English.
Programming is becoming easier last 50 years, it'll still be a profession until there are people who are not willing to do it themselves
Re: Ask HN: Is Programming as a Profession Cooked?
#26This gets asked here weekly.
Re: Ask HN: Is Programming as a Profession Cooked?
#27Yep, we're cooked. Time to sell yourself as a professional vibe coder on Linkedin. I'm not being sarcastic.
Re: Ask HN: Is Programming as a Profession Cooked?
#28It's been about a decade years since many thought full-self-driving cars were "just a couple years away". Reality is that FSD was/is a "few decades away" Same for programming. We can take our hands off the steering wheel for longer stretches of time, this is true, but if you have production apps with real users that spend real money then going to sleep at the wheel is far too risky. Programmers will become the guardi…
Self-driving cars are a bad example, because we are talking about a heavily regulated industries, with fatal consequences of malpractice, and a tool (the car) that is not easily available to the average person. I'm pretty sure that is the cost of cars would be comparable to what a software engineer pays for claude code, government would relax on the laws, and as a society we would accept a few (tens of) thousands of…
A few thoughts:
Someone smart recently wrote that the key factor is becoming who is responsible for the functionality, not who wrote the code. Who guarantees correctness and takes responsibility when shtf?
I’d add - especially when the codebases are becoming unknowable because of complexity and speed of code generation.
And the code is generated by entities that do not have a distinction of correctness, or reality.
Essentially emergent genies which we know are blind to the world but very capable of putting together well-sounding sentences.
Re: Ask HN: Is Programming as a Profession Cooked?
#29Yep, we're cooked. Time to sell yourself as a professional vibe coder on Linkedin. I'm not being sarcastic.
A job taming AI might be a future thing. AI horsemanship.
Re: Ask HN: Is Programming as a Profession Cooked?
#30It's been about a decade years since many thought full-self-driving cars were "just a couple years away". Reality is that FSD was/is a "few decades away" Same for programming. We can take our hands off the steering wheel for longer stretches of time, this is true, but if you have production apps with real users that spend real money then going to sleep at the wheel is far too risky. Programmers will become the guardi…
The last 1% in FSD is an asymptotic challenge. The last 1% in a CRUD app codebase just requires a few engineers.
The last 1% of FSD needs a teenager with 30 hours driving experience. (using the premise of your second sentence applied to the first)